Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Simon Wiesenthal

We thought we were going mad, ... Perhaps we feared (or hoped) we were mad already.

Need | People | Talking |

Simon Wiesenthal

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered. When I started this work, I said to myself, 'I will look for the murderers of all the victims, not only the Jewish victims. I will fight for justice.'

Talking | Tragedy |

Simone Weil

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

Talking |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.

Consciousness | Nature | Reality | World | Value |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

The psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

Individual |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

Beauty | Envy | Love | Talking | Beauty |

Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I cannot appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

Judgment | Talking | Time |

Starhawk, born Miriam Simos NULL

If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of tendency of magic to become superstition. Magic - and among its branches I include psychology as its purpose to describe and change consciousness - is an art.

Stanley Kunitz, fully Stanley Jasspon Kunitz

Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.

Need | Talking | Worth |

Stephan Bodian

When you see everything as the divine expression, including what you once took to belong to you—your body, your thoughts, your feelings—you move with the flow of life instead of struggling against the current.

Experience | Good | Law | Love | Talking | Will | Old |

Stephen Mitchell

Eve bites into the fruit. Suddenly she realizes that she is naked. She begins to cry. The kindly serpent picks up a handkerchief, gives it to her. "It's all right," he says. "The first moment is always the hardest." "But I thought knowledge would be so wonderful," Eve says, sniffling. "Knowledge?!" laughs the serpent. "This fruit is from the Tree of Life."

Happy | Talking | Understand |

Stephen Hawking

However, if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God.

Earth | Fear | Means | Mind | Nature | Need | Past | People | Right | Story | System | Talking | Time | Universe | Will |

Stephen Hawking

I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark.

People | Regard | Talking | Time |

Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

Rather, as he saw it now, the difficulty lay, not in the deed itself, but in the consequences which followed upon not thinking or not knowing.

Feelings | Heart | Illusion | Talking | Words |

Theodore Roszak

Meanwhile, as the party ascended to ever dizzier alcoholic altitudes...

Art | Habit | Life | Life | Art |

Theophrastus NULL

The Boor is one who, having drunk a posset, will go into the Ecclesia. He vows that thyme smells sweeter than any perfume; he wears his shoes too large for his feet; he talks in a loud voice.

Man | Talking | Will |

Thomas Berry

Firstly, the primary status of the universe. The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’. The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.’

Achievement | Addiction | Consequences | Control | Difficulty | Energy | Global | Individual | Order | Society | Society |

Thomas Berry

Wave on wave of life expansion took place for 65 million years. What we are doing when we extinguish the species of trees, extinguish the animals, extinguish the rainforest, we are negating 65 million years of effort. It's not that we are changing human history, we are changing Earth history; we're not just changing human life, we are bringing about a disastrous change in the total life development of the planet Earth.

Achievement | Earth | Energy | Existence | Nothing | Story | Will |

Thomas Berry

We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable.

Conversation | Listening | Talking |

Thomas Berry

For the emergent process, as noted by the geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, is neither random nor determined but creative. Just as in human order, creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth.

Beginning | Energy | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Sacred | Story | Universe | Crisis |